Datong, a thousand-year-old town in Tongling, Anhui Province, has a glorious and glorious history, among which the postal history of Datong is worth recalling and writing, because it has many inspiring thoughts and too many proud sighs. Datong's postal service started from the post station, originated in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China, and experienced the government, the private, the customs and the state. In particular, the Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office, which was founded during the Guangxu period, was an earlier modern postal institution in Anhui and even East China, and its wide jurisdiction and large business volume were unprecedented at that time. However, the fate of the postal service is linked to the fate of the whole country and the nation, after the Qing government was overthrown and the Chase Post Office was taken over by the Republic of China, the postal area was redivided, and the jurisdiction of the Chase Post Office was greatly reduced. In particular, the invasion and occupation of Odori by the Japan invaders, the vitality of Chase was greatly damaged, and the corruption and incompetence of the Nationalist Government caused Odori's postal service to collapse and develop slowly. Nevertheless, the glory of the Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office in China's modern postal history cannot be erased, and its contribution to the development of China's modern postal industry is forever recorded in history.
➥
1. The Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office was brilliant during its existence
The establishment of the Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office was a major event in the postal industry in Anhui at that time, and it was a major event in the postal history of Tongling area. Although Chase had postal agencies such as the Water Horse Station, the Civil Information Bureau, and the Telegraph Office before this, it was not a modern postal service in the true sense. Compared with the post station, the General Post Office of Datong in the Qing Dynasty absolutely benefited the common people, and it was more convenient and faster than the Minxin Bureau, and it was a full range of postal services compared to the Telegraph Office.
01
Two periods, "half of the country"
In March of the 22nd year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty (1896), the Guangxu Emperor approved the memorabilia of Zhang Zhidong, the minister of Nanyang, and the postal regulations drafted by the Englishman Hurd, and officially opened the national postal service of the Qing Dynasty, which was under the management of the Department of Taxation. It is divided into 35 postal boundaries in the country, and Anhui is divided into two postal boundaries in Wuhu and Datong. Postal boundaries, i.e. postal areas. The postal boundary is divided into two periods: the first period, which is based on treaty ports; In the second period, the administrative regions of each province are used as the standard. From the 22nd year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty (1896) to the second year of Xuantong (1910) was the first period, when Wuhu and Datong in Anhui Province were two of the eight postal circles in East China. According to the Postal Regulations of the Qing Dynasty, the General Administration of Postal Boundaries (also known as the General Post Office) should be established at treaty ports to manage postal affairs within the territory. However, it was not established because the conditions for Chase at that time were not met. It was not until the 25th year of Guangxu (1899) that the General Post Office was established, and the site of the bureau was located in the Anhui Salt Administration (a two-story building in the Datong Lijin Bureau at the gate of Yuezhou), which was under the jurisdiction of the Salt Administration and Taxation Department; Externally, it is an independent postal agency, but business leadership, account management and equipment supply are all under the management of the Wuhu General Post Office.
On the first day of October in the thirtieth year of Guangxu (1904), Datong Post Office has become a completely independent general post office, and the post offices under its jurisdiction are: Anqing Mansion (Zongyang, Tongcheng, Qianshan, Taihu, Wangjiang, Huayang Town, Shipai Town, Jiande); Luzhou Mansion (Lujiang); Huizhou Mansion (Tunxi, Xiuning, Jixi, Yixian, Lingyang Town); Taiping Mansion; Chizhou Mansion (Shitai, Tongling, Yinjiahui, Qingyang, Dongliu); Ningguo Mansion (Taiping County). According to the statistics of 1904, the General Post Office of Chase had jurisdiction over 3 general branches, 20 agencies, and a total of 23 post offices; Wuhu General Post Office has jurisdiction over 5 general branches, 18 agencies, a total of 23, which is really the "half of the country" of Anhui modern postal service at that time.
02
The postal route is unimpeded, and the business is developing
After the establishment of the Datong General Post Office, the external postal route was divided into two roads: water and land. There are two waterways, namely Datong to Wuhu and Datong to Anqing, with a total length of 243 kilometers. There are three dry road postal roads, namely Datong to Qingyang, Lingyang, Shitai, Taiping, Jingde, Jixi, Huizhou (She County), to Tunxi postal road is 214 kilometers long; Datong is 119 kilometers long from Guichi to Anqing Post Road; Datong to Tongling County post road 23 kilometers. At that time, there were no roads, no cars, and the dry road and mail road were all carried by foot shifts. After the opening of the postal route, the postal service was fully opened to the people, and Datong Post ushered in an unprecedented and rapid development. According to the statistics at that time: in the 25th year of Guangxu (1899), that is, the year when the General Post Office of Datong was established, the amount of postage stamps sold by the Datong Post Office in the Qing Dynasty reached 24,476 yuan (silver dollars). At that time, the postage of the Qing postal letters was: 2-4 points for domestic ordinary letters, 5 points for single and double registered mail, and 1 corner for foreign (United Postal countries), if each letter was calculated by an average of 5 points, there were more than 400,000 letters sent and transferred from Datong in this year alone, with an average of more than 1,000 letters per day, and the number of such mails was quite amazing at that time. In 1904, after the official establishment of the General Post Office of Odorus, the business was booming, and the number of postal agencies increased year by year. In the seven years from 1904 to 1910, the number of post offices increased from 3 to 6, and the number of agency offices increased from 20 to 75. The number of mails sent and received increased from 105435 to 3,960,900, an increase of 37.56 times, with an average annual increase of 550,780, and the number of parcels increased from 1,488 to 27,100, an increase of 18.21 times, with an average annual increase of 3,658. Such a large business volume shows the glory of modern postal services.
➥
2. Research the historical facts of the General Post Office of Datong in the Qing Dynasty
After reading the above introduction, some people may doubt, and some people will ask, can the events of more than a hundred years ago be so accurate? Is the General Post Office really as glorious as it once was? Yes, the written narrative alone cannot be believed, in order to be convincing, there must be excellent archival materials, even if it is a paper approval, a road slip, a registered receipt at that time, · ·, · However, all this is difficult to find due to the passage of time and vicissitudes.
01
It's very difficult to research
In order to witness the glory of the Datong General Post Office in the Qing Dynasty, the Anhui Tongling Philatelic Association has established a philatelic academic committee since 2006. The main goal of the Academic Committee is to clarify the context of the history of Chase Postal Service and the objective historical existence of Chase Post.
For more than 10 years, the Tongling Philatelic Academic Committee has sent people to visit the old comrades who had worked in the Datong Post Office in the past. Most of these veteran comrades joined the work after liberation, and they generally did not know much about the operation of the Datong Post Office in the Qing Dynasty. But the legend they recounted about the Qing Dynasty Datong post office is interesting and telling.
Legend has it that the director of the Datong Post Office in the Qing Dynasty was very majestic, and he could get 300 oceans a year, and he had to carry a sedan chair eight times when he went out. Although this legend is difficult to confirm, there is some truth, and it was not easy for the Qing Dynasty to be the director of the Datong Post Office, because there were only two such post directors in the entire Anhui Province at that time, and it was possible to show off his majesty.
02
Part of the Qing Dynasty postal history materials were found
It should be said that the establishment of the national postal service in the Qing Dynasty at that time, and the establishment of 35 postal bureaus in the country was a very important event. After years of hard work, with the help of foreign postal friends, I finally found the record at that time in the "1904 Post Office Work Report" made by the Qing Dynasty Post Office Bao Li. In this report, there is a passage that reads: "A small hand-drawn map (Appendix B) is attached to this summary showing the demarcation line of each postal district and the location of the postal services that are now open, together with the reference numbers of the branches, so that their names can be found in marginal lists on the map. ACCORDING TO THIS PROMPT, BETWEEN PAGES 12 AND 13 OF THE ENGLISH EDITION OF THE 1904 POSTAL WORK REPORT, WE FOUND THIS POSTALMAP OF CHINA (1904) (FIGURE 1 IS THE PART OF THIS MAP ABOUT THE CHASE POST OFFICE). The Tatung (Chase) is marked with "35" on the map, which is the number of the postal boundary. More importantly, on both sides of the map, there are 35 directorates of the General Administration of Postal Affairs and 5 deputy general offices of the postal circles, which are also arranged in the code of 1-35 Arabic numerals, and the deputy general offices of the postal circles are arranged in the order of A, B, and C under the name of the General Administration of Postal Circles, and the order of arrangement is the same as in the "Schedule A" of the English version of the "Report on the Work of the Post Office in 1904". The No. 35 is the "Tatung District", which is subordinate to the three inland branches (Branch Office) of Tatung, Anqing (Anking) and Tunhsi, and there are 20 branch offices (B.O. Agencies, literally translated as "letter cabinet" or "post office box", also known as "postal agency"), but the detailed place name is not listed (see Figure 2 is the "China Post Map (1904)" the section on Chase in the marginal note).
(Figure 1)
(Fig. 2)
03
Customs personnel appointments can prove that Chase is the "General Administration of Postal Circles"
In the search, we saw the following records of the positions, levels, responsibilities and numbers of the management personnel of the postal sector in the "General Commentary on the Affairs of the Thirty Years of Guangxu Affairs of the Great Qing Dynasty (1904)": "The staff of the General Post Department and the General Post Department (both in Beijing) of foreign staff have the following records: "The staff of the General Post Department and the General Post Department (both in Beijing), a total of five; Postal Divisions (in charge of the respective postal sectors), with a total of 36 members; Deputy Post Office, with a total of three members; Postal Inspectorate, a total of seven members; The affairs of the Postal Department, totaling 66 "" Post Divisions, are now under the authority of the Customs and Excise Department, which is entrusted to handle the affairs of the Postal Department at the treaty ports, and is called the Post Department. There are two ports where there are full-time postal departments to provide assistance. If the port is too large, the deputy post department will be added. Its Postal Inspectorate is stationed in the Mainland to manage the affairs of the sub-postal sector and to inspect the offices laid in the Mainland. It means: the Customs and Excise Department of each treaty port is also the postal department of the postal industry; There is no postal department in the sub-postal sector, which is stationed and managed by the postal inspector.
(Fig. 3)
According to the "Bulletin on the Appointment of Customs Staff" and the "List of New Customs Titles" in the "General Commentary of the Circular", B.D. Bruce, a United Kingdom deputy third-class assistant of the former Jiang Customs, was transferred to the post of deputy tax department of the Chase Lip Bureau on July 1, 1903 (see Figure 3), and in November 1904, he was also the post department of the Chase General Postal Bureau. According to the information on the appointment of customs officers, if Chase is the Deputy General Directorate of Postal Affairs, the corresponding position of the Bruce Division is "PostalDistrict Inspectors" and not "Postmasterexofficio" (see Figure 4).
(Fig. 4)
Here we come to a conclusion: at that time, when the General Post Office of Chase was officially established in 1904, the director of the United Kingdom Brushi was based on these postal historical materials of the Qing government that we found at that time, because they are state-level archival records, authoritative, reliable, and authentic, and also fully prove that 120 years ago, the General Post Office of Chase was one of the 35 general postal offices under the unified deployment of the Qing government.
➥
3. The physical evidence comes from the "Dragon Seal"
We believe that since the Datong Post Office of the Qing Dynasty existed objectively and historically, and there was such a brilliant business volume at that time, it was possible to find some physical evidence, but in the course of our visit, two old comrades who had worked in the Tongling County Post Office told us that the Datong Post Office still had a few sacks of historical archives in the early days of liberation, which were later lost due to the flood. In order to compile the post and telecommunications chronicles of Tongling County, the Tongling County Post Office had to send people to the Nanjing Post Office to copy some brief records about the Datong Post Office in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China. In this way, it is already very difficult to find relevant historical information. However, we thought that since the Chase Post Office had such a large business volume at that time, and thousands of letters were sent and transferred from the Chase Post Office every day, it is possible that there were letters sent by Chase Transit scattered among the people, and it is possible that they have been preserved to this day. Therefore, since 2008, our philatelic academic committee has focused on collecting and searching for the actual mailed envelopes transferred by the Datong Post Office in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China.
1. "Longfeng" mainly comes from the mountainous areas of southern Anhui
In the mountainous area of southern Anhui Province and Shexian County of Huizhou, the folk cultural heritage is relatively profound, and there are many Huizhou businessmen who are businessmen, and their family letters are more frequent. The local custom is that letters from foreign family members should not be discarded at will, and some letters from several generations of family members are also bundled and placed in the attic. After the reform and opening up, some postal merchants went to the homes of the common people in Huizhou to buy these ancient letters, and then classified them, printed into a catalog, and sold to the outside world.
One of the biggest features of these envelopes is that they are pasted with the Panlong stamps issued by the Qing Dynasty, and the collectors call them "dragon envelopes" for short. In recent years, after unremitting efforts, we have spared no expense to buy more than a dozen late Qing Dynasty and early Republic of China through Datong transit, affixed with Panlong stamps or Panlong stamps of the actual mailing envelope, analysis and study of these "dragon envelopes", it is not difficult to see the glory of Datong Post Office in the past.
These "dragon seals" have undergone a change of dynasty and vicissitudes, and it is very rare that they can be preserved to this day. Through careful inspection of these physical mailing envelopes, we clearly understand that the status of the postal hub of Datong in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China is very prominent. During the existence of the Qing Dynasty Datong Post Office, the jurisdiction is wide, the water and land transportation is convenient, the mail of the following sub-bureaus and agencies should be gathered in Datong, and those who come from south to north must pass through Datong, and those who enter and exit the mountainous areas of southern Anhui must go through Datong, and the number of letters processed every day is not only amazing. Moreover, it involves a number of postal routes and multiple distributions, so it can be said that the staff of the General Post Office of Datong in the Qing Dynasty were very busy every day. Although most of the letters sent and forwarded by Chase at that time have been annihilated and disappeared, there are always a small number of those that have been circulated for more than 100 years and are still preserved to this day. In order to better play the role of these "dragon seals", we used them in the special stamp collection "Chinese Dragons" (this stamp collection won the first prize in Anhui Province). Recently, we have used these "dragon seals" to make a frame of "Datong Transit Post in the Late Qing Dynasty and Early Republic of China" special stamp collection, the purpose is to cherish it, use it, and let them play a greater role in the study of the postal history of Tongling area and witness the glory of Datong Post Office.
2. Stamps and postal date stamps are the main symbols of modern postal services
Judging from the Datong transit envelopes we collected at the end of the Qing Dynasty and the beginning of the Republic of China, there were three main postal stamps used at that time, namely the Qing Dynasty Chinese-English single-line stamp, the Qing Dynasty three-format stem branch stamp, and the Qing Dynasty waist frame type stem branch stamp. These three postmarks were not only the main stamps used during the Qing Dynasty, but were still in use until the early years of the Republic of China. The biggest advantage of the postmark is that it can clearly indicate the time, which is also the irreplaceable main feature of these physical evidences that can bear witness to historical facts.
Fortunately, the year, month, and day of the Ganzhi year on it are very clear (see Figure 5), which is "March 12 of the year of Ding Wei (33rd year of Guangxu of the Qing Dynasty)", that is, March 12, 1907. This is the only Qing Dynasty letter stamp that we have collected so far that can clearly indicate the date, which is very rare.
(Fig. 5)
Over the years, we have been looking for the Qing Dynasty mailing envelope, fortunately we found a 1904 from Datong sent to Anhui Shexian Fuye Town, Lingtian Street Panlong Huang Yifen stamp envelope (see Figure 6), the cover is the double-line outer circle of Anhui Datong three-format postal date stamp, the time is Jiachen year (Qing Dynasty Guangxu 30 years) February 29, that is, February 29, 1904.
(Fig. 6)
We also collected a Qing Dynasty Datong sent to Xunyang, Jiangxi Province Panlong purple red two cents stamp envelope, cancelled by Datong double-line outer ring three-format stem stamp, the date on which is "May 26, 1905" (see Figure 7).
(Fig. 7)
These two Qing Dynasty envelopes are the earliest dates indicated by the postmark used by the Qing Dynasty Datong Post Office, which is the period of the existence of the Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office, which clearly shows that the Datong General Post Office was operating normally and operating normally during this period.
Stamps and postal date stamps are the main symbols of modern postal services, although we have collected the actual mailing envelope with a long age, the postmark imprint left is not very clear, not very complete, but they can at least prove that the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China Chase has entered the ranks of modern postal services, and later the development of postal services in Tongling area is also on this basis.
In short, the existence of the Qing Dynasty Datong General Post Office in history is not long (1899 to 1911), only a short period of ten years, but its historical position can not be ignored, it allows us to bid farewell to the semi-feudal, semi-colonial postal system under the control of foreigners, stride into the country's modern postal ranks, and lay a good foundation for the development of the postal industry later, which has to be said to be a major historical progress and leap.
Author: Zhang Zhongyu Qiu Yongji